BossFeed Briefing for April 5, 2021. Last Friday, the Recovery Rebate (aka HB 1297) advanced out of the WA Senate Ways & Means committee, moving our state one step closer towards getting more cash into the pockets of low-income WA workers. Last Wednesday was Cesar Chavez Day. Yesterday marked 53 years since Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968 while supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis. This Wednesday is National Library Workers’ Day. This Friday is the 86th anniversary of Congress creating the Works Progress Administration, a Depression-era program creating jobs for millions of people amid a 25% national unemployment rate.
Three things to know this week:
We have moved another step closer toward taxing WA’s wealthiest humans, after the WA House Finance Committee voted Friday to advance the billionaire tax (HB 1406). An estimated 100 people in the state would pay this tax.
A new report finds that the minimum wage would be $44 an hour today if it had increased as much as Wall Street bonuses did since 1985. The total 2020 bonus pool for 182,100 New York City-based Wall Street employees was $31.7 billion.
An Instacart shopper in Atlanta stopped a potential mass shooting at a grocery store last week. Charles Russell alerted authorities after entering a bathroom and observing a man loading multiple weapons—including an AR-15 assault rifle, the gun used in last month’s mass shooting at a grocery store in Boulder.
Two things to ask:
WTF? The Port of Seattle is forcing taxi drivers to pay back thousands of dollars in “pandemic debt” they accrued after the Port reversed its initial promise to waive certain trip fees during the pandemic. SeaTac Airport and airline companies have received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal financial support over the past year, which taxi drivers are still waiting to see trickle down.
Are they also planning an announcement about rest and meal breaks? Apple recently declared via press release that it would be giving workers paid time off to get the COVID-19 vaccine. Here in WA, all hourly employees can use their right to paid sick leave for healthcare visits, regardless of whether their employer issues a press release about it.
And one thing that's worth a closer look:
Amazon maintains a small army of Twitter ambassadors who are handpicked for their “great sense of humor” and trained to “speak their truth”, according to leaked internal company documents reported by The Intercept. Amazon started its Veritas ambassador program in 2018 amid increased public scrutiny over working conditions in warehouses, training warehouse employees to defend the company and CEO Jeff Bezos from criticism on social media. Official training documents urge ambassadors to stay true to the program’s central tenet of never offering false information, a noble goal quickly followed by an instruction to never respond to questions about unions or organized labor—you know, the kind of rule you implement when you just want people to tell the truth. Training documents also offer sample responses that are Definitely Real and Not Written by PR Staff, so it’s understandable that several fake Twitter ambassador accounts have recently been confused with real ones, showing how sort of beyond satire the whole thing is.
Read this far?
Consider yourself briefed, boss.
Let us know what you think about this week's look at the world of work, wages, and inequality!